Eat Locally

I will be an even stronger supporter of Eat Locally, when the botanists develop a cacao tree that thrives in the Upper Midwest.

End of semester and MamaRobin

A robin has built her next on top of the patio light fixture. For weeks we were showered by detritus: dried grass, bits of stick, thin wrappings of plastic, string. Maybe she will give up, dumb bird, we thought: the fixture top slopes sideways, to drain water. Maybe she will realize that plastic plus gravity plus unruly barking dogs don’t make a peaceful nursery. PotentialMamaBird did not. I swept away the piles of excelsior; she brought more. The nest sagged into deconstruction; she rewove it. Finally, it sat, a coil of grass and sticks with a wing bobbing length of plastic like the tail on a dumpy kite. MamaBird sat also, bright eyed and unblinking, except for the times she took fright and flight. I felt responsible for our lack of hospitality. “Don’t let the dogs bother the bird,” I would caution. “Don’t hold the door open too long; it bothers the bird.” The dogs barked with abandon. The Bird sat on her precariously shored up nest, staring at us.

After a while we saw other movement in the nest: round heads made of blob of brownish head and wide open mouth. Their mouths were larger than their heads, and bobbed up, almost creatures of their own, each time MamaBird left the nest or returned to it. How could one MamaBird keep up with such expectations? We tried to do our part: when she was tugging worms out of the grass, or snapping them into bits, we sat in the car, waiting for her to finish. We shuffled the dogs out and in with a minimum of dog noise. We stayed back from the windows, though we did peer into her incubator from a distance. The chicks sat in the nest, mouths unhinged to open to their full width, tipped toward the sky. Their mouths seemed wider than their heads, than MamaBird’s head. I would look at them, waiting, greedy, expecting and imploring, and think about the expectations of teaching. Such blind demand is terrifying. How could a mother – or a teacher – ever hope to full those wide open mouths. When will it stop?
How can we read all the texts and reference materials, read the ed journals, read and assess the student papers, maintain discipline and respect, geniality and joy? How can we meet everyone’s expectations: the students, the parents, the support staff, the administration, the public, the country, the future, our family and our own?

The answers are partly and never, or at the end of the semester/school year.

MamaRobin pushes and guides her babies out of the nest. She teaches them to fly, so that next spring while we are snuggling in our fleece jackets and watching baseball televised from the desert lots and orange groves, they can be building their own nests, and looking after their own demanding chicks. Our cycle is years longer; we worry that some of our students will never learn to fly, or nurture others (much less compose an essay free of misspellings and sentence fragments).

What keeps both of us – MamaBird and us – going is not belief that the feeding will end, but determination and faith that we will fulfill our part in the cycle. That’s all we can do. We need to trust to a larger faith: (Mother) Nature, the world, the universe, God, a Supreme Being. We need to believe in Something and Someone beyond our own nest. Then we can bring bits of knowledge and our own energy to the task, believing that what we do in our best efforts will suffice.

End of semester

This week’s non-entry is dedicated to all the other teachers out there who are grading last minute submitted papers, averaging grades, writing finals, grading finals, averaging semester grades, and listening patiently to the 100th student’s repetition of “sick grandmother” as a viable reason for not producing (work, not grandmother).

It’s an educational belief that grease, salt, and chocolate make grading a stack of papers more palatable. Bring on the chocolate and potato chips.

What do you mean?

In a world where we often seem divided (political viewpoints, money, time, free time, computers which are supposed to simplify our lives, and spring weeds which will turn into summer pestilence), I’ve found that asking my students to define words in their experience by their personal opiions, can lead to clarity. Definitions don’t always lead to tolerance or improved communication, but they do frequently lead to clarity. Buckmaster Fuller pondered how he defined words, and commented that creating his personal (connotative) dictionary [in contrast to our shared Webster’s denotative dictionary] was a turning point in his communication with others and himself.

I explain this idea of personal knowledge through understanding how we use words, to the students, and ask them to create a dictionary of their meanings, using words of their own choice. Following are some of the students’ definitions.

Education: The difference between making five dollars an hour and thirty dollars an hour. An accomplishment that pays off both physically and mentally.
Education: to learn a skill. A block of instruction. Something I received after I said, “I do.”
Education: Something I realized after fifteen years is the hardest thing to come back to and it sucks to have to admit my mother was right when she said, “Trust me. Go to school now while you’re in high school, or you’ll regret it later.”
Too much homework: three essays assigned in one week for my favorite English class. When my backpack is so full that I can’t even walk standing straight up, but leaning forward.
Too much homework: two papers due on the same day, a test, a presentation on the same day. This semester being my first in over a decade made me feel overwhelmed at times because of all the after-class assignments. Sometimes I would get home from work and realize there were assignments due the next day and work on them till early the next morning.